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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Astonishing, Wet Faces Of Sleeping Insects [Monsters Among Us]


via io9 by Annalee Newitz on 3/29/10

This bejeweled creature is actually a fly, covered in tiny droplets of dew that gathered on his body while he slept through the early morning hours. It's from a series of shimmering insect photographs taken in the Polish forest.
To take photos like these, amateur photographer Miroslaw Swietek goes out into the forest near his village around 3 AM with a flashlight and camera, looking for insects to shoot. Insects go into a sleep-like state where they barely move for a few hours a night, and that's how dew collects on their bodies. Swietek says he loves photographing insects and lizards.
See more of these astonishing images via the Daily Mirror or via Swietek's personal gallery.
The Astonishing, Wet Faces Of Sleeping Insects
The Astonishing, Wet Faces Of Sleeping Insects
The Astonishing, Wet Faces Of Sleeping Insects
The Astonishing, Wet Faces Of Sleeping Insects

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Awesome! I want one!

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Picasso Bites on Buonarroti (aka OMG! Original Content III!!!)




So everyone knows "It took [Picasso] four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."


Picasso at 15:







Picasso in his 80's:













But, on his death bed, aged 88, Michelangelo is reputed to have said ‘I am dying just as I am beginning to learn the alphabet of my profession’. As he got older he moved further and further away from technique towards a more ‘expressionist’ handling of the stone. 
Michelangelo in his 20's:





Michelangelo in his 80's:




Pay close attention to the second rendering it is rough hewn and ‘unfinished’ but strangely (it can be argued) has greater artistic power and merit. E.g. Jesus looks f-ing heavy. Better communicating the gravity of the situation (pun intended!). Here, you are compelled to leave objective appreciation of technical skill for the more interpretive world of impressionism.
I mean come on! Jesus is missing a leg!!!!
Q.E.D. BITCHES!

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Friday, March 19, 2010

My sister is Hiking the Appalachian Trail!

She goes with her friend from Americorp, Meg. Here is their blog: http://ridgelines.wordpress.com/

Today marks the end of the first leg. ~50 miles from the trailhead at Springer Mt. GA to Helen, GA. Go Joss, GO!

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Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Oldest Trees on the Planet


    Lifted straight out of Wired


    PandoTrees are some of the longest-lived organisms on the planet. At least 50 trees have been around for more than a millenium, but there may be countless other ancient trees that haven’t been discovered yet.
    Trees can live such a long time for several reasons. One secret to their longevity is their compartmentalized vascular system, which allows parts of the tree to die while other portions thrive. Many create defensive compounds to fight off deadly bacteria or parasites.
    And some of the oldest trees on earth, the great bristlecone pines, don’t seem to age like we do. At 3,000-plus years, these trees continue to grow just as vigorously as their 100-year-old counterparts. Unlike animals, these pines don’t rack up genetic mutations in their cells as the years go by.
    Some trees defy time by sending out clones, or genetically identical shoots, so that one trunk’s demise doesn’t spell the end for the organism. The giant colonies can have thousands of individual trunks, but share the same network of roots.
    This gallery contains images of some of the oldest, most venerable and impressive trees on earth.
    While Pando isn’t technically the oldest individual tree, this clonal colony of Quaking Aspen in Utah is truly ancient. The 105-acre colony is made of genetically identical trees, called stems, connected by a single root system. The “trembling giant” got its start at least 80,000 years ago, when all of our human ancestors were still living in Africa. But some estimate the woodland could be as old as 1 million years, which would mean Pando predates the earliest Homo sapiens by 800,000 years. At 6,615 tons, Pando is also the heaviest living organism on earth.
    The photo above of the Pando colony was taken by Rachel Sussman, as part of The Oldest Living Things In The World project.
    Image: “Clonal Quaking Aspens #0906-4318 (80,000 years old, Fish Lake, UT)” / Rachel Sussman


    The world’s oldest individual tree lives 10,000 feet above sea level in the Inyo National Forest, California. A staggering 4,765 years old, this primeval tree was already a century old when the first pyramid was built in Egypt. The tree is hidden among other millennia-old Great Basin bristlecone pines in a grove called the Forest of Ancients. To protect the tree from vandalism, the forest service keeps its exact location secret, but this one looks like it could be Methuselah.

    Methuselah

    Image: cwsteeds/flickr.


    This giant cypress lives in Abarkooh, Iran. The evergreen took root between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago, around the time that Stonehenge was being completed. It may be the oldest living thing in Asia, and is a national monument in Iran. The Zorastrian Sarv stands about 82 feet high and has a girth of 37.8 feet.

    Zoroastrian Sarv (Sarv-e-Abarkooh)

    Copyright Image: Leo Kerner/flickr.


    This common yew in Llangernyw, Wales, sprouted during Britain’s Bronze Age, and is between 3,000 and 4,000 years old. Yew trees can live so long because new shoots from the trunk fuse with it. When the main trunk dies, these offshoots keep going. Branches can also take root in the rotting trunk, or reach down into the soil near the base.

    Llangernyw Yew

    Image: Wikimedia Commons


    The majestic evergreen tree was discovered in 1993 in a grove in the Andes Mountains of south-central Chile. Using tree rings, scientists showed the giant is 
    3,620 years old. Though these Patagonian cypresses can reach 150 feet tall, they gain only a millimeter in girth each year, and can take a thousand years to be full-grown. The Zoroastrian Sarv and the Llangernyw yew are thought to be older, but the Alerce is the second oldest tree to have its exact age calculated.

    Alerce Tree

    Image:andreaugarte/flickr


    This giant bald cypress lives in the semi-tropical Big Tree Park, Florida, among palm trees. The Senator is the biggest tree by volume east of the Mississippi River. The 125-foot-tall behemoth is about 3,500 years old. The cypress germinated around the same time as the Polynesians first settled Fiji.

    The Senator

    Image: rogue_poet/flickr


    This cryptomeria tree’s 83-foot height and 53-foot girth makes it the largest conifer in Japan. The tree grows in a misty, old-growth forest on the north face of the tallest mountain on Yakushima island in Japan. Tree rings indicate the venerable cryptomeria is at least 2,000 years old, though some estimate it could be as old as 7,000 years.

    Jōmon Sugi


    This towering giant sequoia stretches 275 feet, about as tall as a 27-story high-rise building, and is 102.6 feet around. That makes it the largest (by volume) individual tree in the world. The general lives in the Sequoia National Park in California. Scientists believe this tree could be anywhere from 2,300 years old to 2,700 years old.

    General Sherman

    Image: yathin/flickr


    This majestic Kauri tree is nestled in the last stretch of a primeval rainforest in Waipoua Forest, New Zealand. The tree is thought to be around 2,000 years old. With a 52.5-foot girth, Te Matua Ngahere is the fattest tree in New Zealand. The giant, whose name means “Father of the Forest” in Maori, was severely damaged in a storm in 2007.

    Te Matua Ngahere

    Image: Dunk the Funk/flickr.


    This juniper tree lives in the Cache National Forest in Utah. It was originally thought to be around 3,200 years old, but core samples downgraded it to a mere 1,500 years old. It’s around 40 feet tall and 24 feet around.

    Jardine Juniper

    Image: thraceknits/flickr


    This gnarled, ancient oak tree is set away in the Jægerspris North Forest in Denmark. Scientists estimate the “King Oak” is between 1,500 to 2,000 years old, making it a contender for the title of oldest individual tree in Northern Europe. Though it germinated in an open meadow, the trees growing around it are slowly closing in on the old oak and killing it.

    Kongeegen

    Image: Wikimedia Commons


    This ancient, 16-foot tall Norway spruce lives in the scrubby Fulufjället Mountains in Sweden. At 9,550 years, Old Tjikko is the oldest single-stemmed clonal tree, and took root not long after the glaciers receded from Scandinavia after the last ice age. To figure out the hardy spruce’s age, scientists carbon-dated its roots. For thousands of years, the forbidding tundra-climate kept Old Tjikko in shrub form. But as weather warmed over the last century, the shrub has grown into a full-fledged tree. The spruce’s discoverer, geologist Leif Kullman, named the tree after his dead dog.

    Old Tjikko

    Image: Copyright Leif Kullman.




    Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/old-tree-gallery/all/1#ixzz0ia7wrYMB

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    Wednesday, March 17, 2010

    In your face, waterskiing squirrel!




    updated 6:12 p.m. ET, Tues., March. 16, 2010
    SAN BARTOLO - Peruvian surfer Domingo Pianezzi has spent a decade training dogs to ride the nose of his board when he catches waves, and now he is the first to do so with an alpaca.
    Pianezzi, 44, has slowly introduced his alpaca Pisco, a domesticated Andean highland animal that resembles a small llama, to the waters of the Pacific Ocean over the past several months.
    The duo caught three waves on a yellow 10-foot (3-meter) longboard on Tuesday at a small break south of Lima, Peru's capital. Pisco, wearing a flotation vest, crouched on the board while taking off on each wave and cruised for a few seconds before bailing into the water with a bit of a fright.
    Pianezzi, who teaches surfing to kids and has competed before at international contests for people and their surfing dogs, came up with the idea of hitting the waves with an alpaca while visiting Australia.
    "I've surfed with a dog, a parrot, a hamster and a cat, but when I was at a competition in Australia I saw people surfing with kangaroos and koalas," said Pianezzi, who trains the alpaca in the Peruvian beach town of San Bartolo.
    "So I thought that, as a Peruvian, it would be interesting to surf with a unique animal that represents Peru."
    Peruvians raise alpacas, a species of South American camelid, primarily for their warm wool and occasionally for food.
    Pianezzi says some San Bartolo residents have accused him of mistreating Pisco by taking a mountain animal into the ocean. Others, however, regard him as an innovator.
    There are other hurdles.
    Unlike a Labrador Retriever, an alpaca does not instinctively jump into the sea for a swim.
    Pianezzi, however, says Pisco, whom he named in homage to the distinctive Peruvian liquor distilled from grapes, is getting used to the water.




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    Safety Dance!

    That reminds me of my foray into graphical representation of songs:

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    !!!!!

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    Monday, March 15, 2010

    Obama Policy Shelves Popular Stem Cell Lines

    Lifted straight out of NPR

    A colony of embryonic stem cells from the H9 cell line.
    EnlargePublic Domain, via Wikimedia
    A magnified view of a colony of embryonic stem cells from the H9 stem cell line, one of the few lines approved for federally funded research under the Bush administration. These cells are now off-limits under a new policy set up by President Obama.
    text sizeAAA
    March 15, 2010
    A bitter irony has befallen researchers who use federal money to study stem cells from human embryos.
    Some of the old, dependable stem cells that were OK to study with federal funds under the Bush administration are off-limits so far under a new policy set up by President Obama.
    Scientists welcomed that policy shift, which was announced back in March of 2009. It allowed the National Institutes of Health to set up a new system that has added more stem cell lines to its registry of those that are acceptable for use with federal funds.
    But geneticist Julie Baker of Stanford University got a shock when she recently tried to apply for a new NIH grant. The online application kept sending her an error message when she tried to submit her proposal. "So then of course I panicked, and, you know, we had to try and figure out what was going on," Baker recalls.
    The problem: Her application said her lab would be using a stem cell line called H9. But, "it looks like the H9 line, which is the line that we use for 99 percent of our work, is no longer on the NIH registry," she says.
    A 'Huge Setback'?
    Baker set up her lab to use the H9 cell line because it was accepted under the Bush administration. She doesn't understand why it's not on the new registry, and she's worried.
    "It's a huge setback because we've spent about six years studying the biology of that particular line," Baker says, explaining that the cell lines all have unique properties and are not interchangeable. Her lab can't switch to a new one overnight. It would take months to get new cells growing, and her team would have to redo experiments.
    "I mean, for 10 years, the government told us to use a handful of lines. And now they're telling us we can't use those lines," she says. "So they've just wasted millions of dollars and lots of resources, which just seems outrageous to me."
    It's a strange turn of events for researchers who used to bemoan the restrictions of the Bush administration. Back then, they could only use federal funds to study 18 stem cell lines, says Christopher Scott, who directs Stanford University's Program on Stem Cells in Society.
    "It's interesting to see that of the original 18 lines, only one has made it onto the new stem cell bank, which we could call the Obama bank," he says.
    That's a problem because the whole field of stem cell science has been built upon a few lines from the old list.
    For example, Scott and his colleagues recently did one study to see what cell line was used in 534 scientific publications during the period from 1999 to 2008. They found that the H9 line appears in 83.3 percent of the published research. Another line, H1, is in 60.9 percent of research reports, while a third, H7, is in 24.2 percent.
    The H1 line is in the new NIH registry, but the other two are not. And if federal money can't be used for this kind of lab workhorse, Scott says, the new stem cell policy will be, in a practical sense, no better than the old one.
    "If these lines are not grandfathered and put on the registry, then we'll be back to the Bush years, where researchers will have to be very, very careful about setting up their labs in two pieces," he explains.
    One side of the lab would be reserved for cells that can be studied with federal grants, and the other side would be set up to work with cells using money from different sources. That's exactly the kind of unnecessary duplication that the new policy was supposed to fix.
    The Need For Review
    Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, says the new policy has been successful in expanding the registry and giving federally funded scientists access to many more stem cell lines.
    "There are 43 approved lines and there are 115 more that have been submitted that are in the works of being reviewed," Collins says.
    The NIH review checks things like whether embryos were donated with proper informed consent. And because the agency wants to be consistent, the old lines also need to get this kind of review.
    But Collins says the NIH can't do a review until it receives an application. And applications have only been submitted for a few of the Bush-era lines. "We certainly have done everything we can think of to encourage those who developed those lines to submit the information," he says.
    For example, they haven't gotten an application for stem cell line H9. "We have been hearing for weeks that an application for H9 is imminent, and frankly, we're kind of frustrated that we haven't seen it yet," Collins says. "So you should talk to the folks who derived that line and find out why they haven't done it."
    Those folks would be the WiCell Research Institute, a private nonprofit group linked to stem cell science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Its executive director, Erik Forsberg, says the only Bush-era line on the new registry, H1, is one of their lines. This popular cell line was made with an embryo from the University of Wisconsin, making it relatively easy to get documents for a new NIH application.
    But Forsberg said H9 and some other WiCell lines came from embryos collected elsewhere. "So we have to work with another group to obtain the correct documents, which is what we're doing now," he explained.
    He declined to name that group. But a 1998 research paper in the journal Science that described these cell lines makes it clear that the embryos came from the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel. Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor, a stem cell expert at that center, is the only author on that paper from Israel.
    In a brief phone conversation, Itskovitz-Eldor said the lines hadn't been submitted to the NIH for approval yet because "it's a matter of paperwork" that was being gathered together. He said if researchers were worried that they'd no longer be able to use these important cell lines, to tell them that "they will."
    Back at Stanford, Baker said her lab was "definitely going to start the process of obtaining some of the other lines just for backup just in case, you know, H9 disappears altogether, which would be tragic, from our point of view."
    And in the end, to get that new NIH grant application accepted, she simply stated that the proposed research would be done with one of the stem cell lines on the NIH registry. She just hopes that H9, the one she has used for years, will get on there soon.

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    Sunday, March 14, 2010

    And while we're looking stuff up on Youtube...

    a classic:

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    Tara's Dad

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    Friday, March 12, 2010

    $770 1 Bedroom in a 6Br, 3 story Bro Palace- America (Mt. Pleasant)

    It has been suggested that I include this craigslist ad. I suppose we are an equal-opportunity aggregator and should follow-up on the hipster house cleaner with the following (relative) cultural diversity:


    Date: 2010-03-04, 9:04PM EST
    Reply to: hous-fhntj-1629085335@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]


    WARNING: If you are not a complete Brohemouth, do not read this ad. The awesome of this house will make your face melt like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

    We've had this Temple to Broseidon under our control since W. went Ameri-bro and Mission Accomplished the shit out of Iraq and it has seen some of the greatest bros of the last decade pass through its hallowed halls: 2 direct descendants of the A-Team, they guy who came up with Under Armour's "We must protect this house" campaign, Nicholas Cage, and a surfer bro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-5F_7DwPpo) that made Keanu Reeves in Point Break look like Lionel Richie. After coming to America to learn the ways of the brah, our recent international brotege (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlWNg4k0MLY) has flown by the seat of his pants back Down Under, most likely to bang as many foreign chicks as possible. We're looking for a bro of epic broportions, talent and exploits to fill his spot in the brahacracy.

    About the house itself:
    • The house, as any true Brotel should, has its own brah-niker: Sparta, because what's more brah than being the most cock diesel fighters of all the ancient world? Slaying mad bitches that’s what, which were pretty sure the Spartans did too. if these guys were around today they'd wear Affliction Tees for sure bro
    • Kitchen equipped with multiple blenders for protein shakes
    • if you need to know more, then you’re no bro, and your face will start melting any minute now

    The bros in this house like to party hard and bang chicks even harder. If you hate China and Russia winning any Olympic medal and shed a bro-tear when Phelps won his 8th gold medal, join the club. However, only real Teddy Brosevelts know the true tragedy was that the IOC (also known as Vichy France) didn’t let Phelps compete in every event.

    Moving on, owning some container capable of holding more than 4 beers at once is an absolute requirement. Having recently banged a chick born in the 90's is a plus. If it was doggy and you didn't call her ever again…BRO-FIVE!

    If you think you're brah enough to enter the kingdom of brah, respond to this ad. Our response will either come in the form of an email or by means of bald eagle courier. RamBros love America.

    Brahsta La Vista.
    image 1629085335-2
    image 1629085335-0
    image 1629085335-1
    image 1629085335-3
    • Location: Mt. Pleasant
    • it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests


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